Tagged: advertising

So the future visited by Marty McFly and Doc Brown is finally here, although we don’t yet have flying cars, rehydrating food and self-drying clothes! Nobody may use fax machines and pay phones anymore and people certainly don’t wear two ties at once, but Back To The Future Part II’s prediction of Wednesday October 21st 2015 has turned out to be surprisingly close to reality.

Scanning fingerprints for payments have recently become a thing through Apple Pay and other similar offerings and smart homes are also starting to exist. VR glasses like Microsoft’s upcoming Hololens and the Oculus Rift were all correctly predicted, as were tablets, smartwatches that tell you the weather, Skype/Facetime, drones, multi-channel TV watching, 3D movies and a cinema box office dominated by movie franchises with multiple sequels. The Chicago Cubs might even win Baseball’s World Series this year as they’re amongst the final four teams in the postseason. It’s incredible just how much the film got correct.

The film’s huge fanbase has meant that pretty much ever since the film was released back in 1989, the anticipation surrounding the October 21st 2015 date and whether the predictions would come true has been around and this has led to some companies recently acting on the product placements they had. Pepsi Perfect was the drink of choice in Back To The Future’s version of 2015 and so Pepsi recently announced that it would be selling a limited run of the drink styled in the same design as seen in the film for $20.15. At the recent New York Comic Con they gave out free bottles to anyone dressed as Marty McFly, which resulted in huge crowds of people dressed as the time traveller.

In 2011 Nike sold a limited run of shoes designed like the ones Marty wore in the film. They were sold to benefit charity, but one crucial element was missing, self-lacing. Recently, Nike announced that they were planning on selling the shoe, the Nike Air MAG, sometime in 2015 with the self-lacing element. This is heavily rumoured to be happening today and has of course created a lot of mentions on twitter, with around 14,000 retweets on a tweet to Michael J. Fox that simply says “See you tomorrow”. But whether that tweet actually has anything to do with the shoes, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Both of these products are taking advantage of the desirability and collectors value that they have for fans of the film franchise. The announcements of them generated massive social media traffic and will probably continue to in the days ahead.

But these aren’t the only example of recent marketing based around the film, Ford (whose cars were used as the basis for the ones seen in the film) recently released this tongue in cheek video promoting a ‘Flux Capacitor upgrade’ for its cars.

And Universal, the studio that made the Back To The Future franchise, have released this spoof trailer for Jaws 19, the film whose holographic shark Marty ran into in 2015 Hill Valley.

In some ways, Back To The Future Part II and the vision of the future it predicted feel like they have almost shaped the real future itself. Fans of the film have strived to make those predictions a reality and no more so than with one of the most memorable items from the film, the hoverboard. Two different companies, Hendo and Lexus, are creating their own versions of the worlds first real life hoverboard, and whilst they might not yet be to the same ability as seen in the film, they’re still a lot more cool looking in my opinion than those segways without handlebars that everyone is calling ‘hoverboards’ at the moment.

This is all a great example of how brands and companies can capitalise on product placements and the anticipation and excitement surrounding a particular date, the social media sharing and discussion of these videos and products have caused the majority of them to go viral in the run up to today. Whilst Back To The Future Part II may now be a film about the past rather than the future, there’s no reason why the last few predictions of the film couldn’t come true in the coming years. Whilst we may still need roads for now, who knows what the future will bring, now where can I preorder my hoverboard?

One of my final projects from the last year of my university degree involved me taking what is known as ‘sleeveface’ photos of my friends. This was to help make the advertising campaign for a new series of singles nights that I had created for lovers of vinyl records.

The adverts blended record sleeves with actual people, aligning them together to give the impression of one single figure. I then used song lyrics from the artists featured to link back to the idea of a singles night, as if the figure in each of them was saying this line to another attendee. The rest of the project can be found on my website here.

I’m talking about this project because today I came across the work of Malaysia-based Graphic Designer Jaemy Choong. He uses a similar technique to create images, except instead of vinyl record sleeves, he uses movie postcards. He still has the same clever mixture of physical and print, merging people together effortlessly with the figures seen on the cards. It’s a really fun process and its great to see the two elements working together so well. Here are a few of my favourites:

Full credit to him for getting them aligned so perfectly, I know from experience just how difficult it can be to get it to work. You can see more of these pictures on his Instagram here.

Crowdsourcing has become an often used tactic by companies recently, especially by Walkers with their many ‘do us a flavour’ competitions. The latest to jump on this bandwagon though is none other than McDonald’s, who have recently launched a ‘Build Your Own Burger’ campaign to come up with new flavours for their menu. Their UK stores have teamed up with digital agency Razorfish London to create a ‘Burger Builder’ that allows you design your dream burger from a list of ingredients that contain both standard ones such as cheese and bacon, as well as new ones like guacamole and pineapple. Five winning designs will be released for a week each over a five-week period similar to the McDonald’s Tastes of America campaign.

The competition has proved incredibly successful so far, with well over 52,000 unique designs currently submitted. However, a look through the ‘most popular’ tab shows that it may not have had the desired effect, as many of them are just gluten-free versions of burgers already on the McDonald’s menu. There are though a few really interesting sounding ones, such as (and I’m definitely not being biased here) my Sweet ‘N’ Smokey burger.

Crowdsourcing in this way is definitely popular and is a really nice way to get customers involved even more closely with the iconic McDonald’s brand. Its created a really interesting look at what other people consider their dream burger to be, as you can definitely create some odd combinations with flavours like brie slices, guacamole and pesto mayonnaise. I’m interested to see what the final five are.

It may seem as though I am exclusively looking at advertising recently on this blog, but it’s just what I’m seeing the most because I watch so much TV! So this’ll be the third and final (for now) in what has become a mini series of posts about witty TV adverts recently (see the other two here and here).

This advert by advertising agency Fold7 is for cider brand Somersby. Using branding created by Taxi Studio, it came out a while ago but I’ve only just recently seen it on TV.

The advert is a brilliant spoof of Apple products and stores, parodying different terminology in some really inventive ways such as ‘pips’ instead of ‘bits’ and naming the operating system ‘pump’ after the pump which pours the pint. Somersby are by no means the first company to parody Apple and their customers in advertising, with Nokia and Samsung, among others, having done so before. However, in my opinion, it’s the little subtle and humorous references that set this advert apart from the others. The clever parodying of single and dual-core processors as apples and the subtle nod to the iPhone unlock with the thumb swiping across the glass at the end are just two of these great references in this clever and playful advert that shows just what Somersby is all about, ‘less apps, more apples’!

The success of the advert is clearly visible, with over 1.5 million YouTube views, and a whole host of positive comments about it on social media.

Recently there seems to have been a new wave of comedic and slightly over the top TV adverts being released, such as the booking.com one that I talked about on Friday. I saw this advert the other day and it sort of follows the trend, but maybe not as successfully.

It is funny and the advert is nicely set up, but by using Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury to advertise Sky Broadband ‘Shield’, you can’t help but feel that it is just publicity for the new Marvel film. They even have film clips at the start and Jackson explicitly mentions ‘the winter soldier’, the villain of the new film.

The advert forms part of a recent series of sky adverts that have featured celebrities such as Idris Elba, Al Pacino and Joanna Lumley, the latter of which is, in my opinion, by far the best of the series. The use of her comedic impressions of TV show characters, especially in the advert for The Walking Dead, make them really engaging and amusing. She makes a surprisingly good zombie!

When I first saw these Sky adverts, they initially reminded me of the great Virgin Media adverts that featured celebrities like David Tennant, due to them sharing a similar comedic style.

This shared comedy style also reminded me of those old cinema adverts from Orange, from before they became EE. As far as I’m concerned they are still the best of this style of advert that’s ever been released. They just have something that the others don’t, however I’m not quite sure what that ‘something’ is!

Of course this is all just my own opinion on these adverts and everyone has their own. What are your thoughts?

Just a quick post today, but I wanted to use it to talk about one of my favourite adverts of 2014 so far. When most people think of holiday or hotel advert, the first ones that will probably come to mind will be Trivago or Premier Inn, maybe even Hotels Combined or that slightly odd Thomson Holidays one with the ogre.

The one that comes to mind for me though is the advert for booking.com, with its hilarious voice over and equally hilarious shots of holiday goers. It makes watching the advert fun, something you don’t really get from the other holiday and hotel advert, and draws you in. The voice over makes it sound like some sort of epic movie trailer, which is made all the better when you see it in a cinema like I did a few weeks ago. Yes, it is a bit over the top, but who wouldn’t want recreational sand, aggressive relaxation or even maximum plushosity from their hotel? It’s exciting, fun and most of all memorable.

I’ve also just put up a new project on my Behance page, there’s just a taster below, so click here to have a look at the full project.

To promote corneal donation in an effort to reduce the number of corneal problems in Latin America, Sao Paulo-based creative agency F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi created a great new campaign.

Created for the Pan American Association of Eye Banks, it shows just how something as simple as a pair of eyes can give inanimate objects life.

This use of googly eyes to transform inanimate objects is not a new idea. In fact, its part of a wider street art movement called “eyebombing” which was started by two Danish street artists. Their goal was to humanise the streets and the movement has attracted a huge following since its inception.

You can see more “eyebombing” photos on the movement’s Flickr page and website, where you can also purchase an “eyebombing” starter kit to help you spread it further.